Friday, August 18, 2006

Buddhabrot Aerobics

I'm suffering from an incurable illness called nomipsnofunia, a serious disability to have fun without involving a lot of heavy computations. For example, when I read about Buddhabrots I compulsively needed to compute ones myself too. But I also decided to study what happens when we generalize the magic constant "2" in the Mandelbrot iteration formula z=z^2+c. In the animated gif below, which I baptized to Aerobics Buddhabrot, the exponent rotates around a circle with center at 2 and radius of 0.2 on the complex plane.

I also computed a three-minute PAL-resolution mpg movie (17 MB of MPEG-4 encoded video in AVI) where the exponent rotates around a cirle of radius 2 centered at the origo. A colleague described the visual effect as "the Buddha throwing his guts out, rotating them around him through infinity, and assembling himself back again on the other side." I employed some thirty workstations to compute the frames during the last few weeks.

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About Me

A gradually middle-aging hacker, a software engineer currently working on my PhD in computer science at the Helsinki University of Technology, married, a happy father of two small daughters who are probably bound to outsmart me in everything except some arcane programming languages, a modest/low-carber, member of IKI and Skepsis, and someone who likes good discussions, elegant algorithms, terse software designs, puzzles with an element of surprize, cycling, cooking, and - given a relaxed schedule - building or renovating woodwork.